Smartest Dog Breeds, Ranked: What the Research Really Says

You have probably seen the lists: the smartest dog breeds, ranked from Border Collie down. Almost all of them trace back to one 1994 book and a survey of obedience judges. That ranking is still useful, but it measures one specific kind of smart, and newer genetics and cognition studies have added some surprising footnotes. Here is the top 10, how it was built, and what the research says about breed and brains.

What is the smartest dog breed?

The Border Collie, and it is not close. When Stanley Coren, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, asked North American obedience judges to rate breeds, the agreement at the top was striking. In Coren’s own account in Psychology Today, 190 of the 199 judges who answered placed the Border Collie in their top 10.

Coren published the ranking in The Intelligence of Dogs, which Publishers Weekly reviewed ahead of its April 1994 release. More than 30 years later it is still the backbone of nearly every “smartest dog breeds” list you will find, including the American Kennel Club’s.

At the other end, 121 of the 199 judges put the Afghan Hound in their bottom 10. As you will see, that says more about what was being measured than about the Afghan Hound’s brain.

The 10 most intelligent dog breeds, ranked

Below is Coren’s top 10 for working and obedience intelligence. We added each breed’s American Kennel Club group, and one thing stands out: the list is dominated by dogs bred to work closely with people.

Four of the ten are herding dogs, two are retrievers and two are working guard breeds. The Papillon is the surprise: a toy breed that made the top 10 alongside much larger working dogs.

A few notes on the top five:

• Border Collie. The AKC describes Border Collies as bright workaholics. They show up again and again in the research below, from vocabulary studies to self-control tests.
• Poodle. The AKC describes Poodles as extremely intelligent and easily trained, and as agile, graceful dogs that excel at canine sports such as agility and obedience.
• German Shepherd Dog. The AKC calls it “dogkind’s finest all-purpose worker” and lists it as loyal, confident, courageous and steady.
• Golden Retriever. The AKC calls Goldens serious workers at hunting and field work, as guides for the blind and in search-and-rescue.
• Doberman Pinscher. The AKC places it among the world’s finest protection dogs and credits it with “keen intelligence.”

How Stanley Coren ranked the smartest dog breeds

Coren passed over the obvious data source, obedience-trial records, because they “get mixed up with popularity,” as he explained in Psychology Today. A breed with tens of thousands of registered dogs will rack up more titles than a rare one, whatever its brainpower. In the year he checked, Otterhounds earned no obedience degrees at all, while Golden Retrievers earned 1,284.

So he went to the experts. Coren sent a long questionnaire to obedience judges from the AKC and the Canadian Kennel Club. According to his account, 199 judges responded, roughly half of all the obedience judges listed in North America. A breed made the final list only if at least 100 judges rated it, which produced a ranking of 133 breeds.

That method has two big implications:

1. It is expert opinion, not a test score. No dog sat an exam. The ranking reflects what experienced judges saw in the ring.
2. It measures one kind of intelligence. Obedience judges see how quickly dogs learn and follow commands, so that is what the list captures.

So when a headline crowns the cleverest dog breed, it is really naming the breed that judges saw learn and obey fastest.

The three types of dog intelligence

Coren himself was careful about what his ranking meant. He split dog intelligence into three types:

• Instinctive intelligence: what a dog was bred to do, such as herding, retrieving or pointing. Coren argued you cannot meaningfully compare breeds on this, because each was bred for a different job.
• Adaptive intelligence: what a dog learns on its own from experience, including solving new problems. This varies a lot between individual dogs of the same breed.
• Working and obedience intelligence: what a dog can learn when a human teaches it. Coren called this “the closest to what we might call school-learning ability” (Psychology Today), and it is the only type his breed ranking measures.

Psychologists make a similar point about people: “intelligence” covers several different abilities, and a single score never captures all of them. If you are curious how that plays out in humans, our guide to the types of intelligence walks through the main models.

Which dogs are most intelligent? What newer research says

Coren’s survey is three decades old. Since then, scientists have tested thousands of dogs directly and read their DNA. Four findings stand out.

Breed explains less than you think. In a 2022 study published in Science, Kathleen Morrill and colleagues combined owner surveys for 18,385 dogs with DNA from 2,155 of them. Their headline result: breed explains just 9% of behavioral variation in individual dogs.

Biddability, meaning how well a dog responds to human direction, was the trait most tied to breed. Herding breeds scored as more biddable, and breeds rated high for “ease of training” tended to be more biddable and more toy-motivated. In mixed-breed dogs, more Border Collie ancestry went with slightly higher biddability. So Coren’s judges were picking up something real, but breed is a weak predictor of any single dog.

Breeds differ on some skills, not all. A University of Helsinki study, published in Scientific Reports in 2022 (Junttila and colleagues), put 1,002 Finnish dogs from 13 breeds through seven cognitive tests and three behavior tests. Belgian Malinois were best at reading human gestures, with Labrador Retrievers close behind. Malinois and Border Collies were fastest at a spatial problem-solving task, and Border Collies excelled at self-control. Yet the researchers found no breed differences at all in logical reasoning or short-term memory.

Some of it is heritable. Using citizen-science data from the Dognition project on 1,508 dogs from 36 breeds, researchers estimated how much of the breed-to-breed difference in cognition follows genetic relatedness (Gnanadesikan et al., 2020, Animal Cognition). Inhibitory control (self-control) came out highly heritable at 0.70, and communication at 0.39, while memory (0.17) and physical reasoning (0.21) were much lower.

Bigger brains help with some tasks. A study of more than 7,000 purebred dogs from 74 breeds found that breeds with larger brains did better on short-term memory and self-control, but not on following human pointing or on reasoning tasks (ScienceDaily summary of Horschler et al., 2019). Brain size was estimated from breed standards, and the lead author said the mechanism is still unknown.

Gifted dogs: when the individual beats the breed

Some of the most striking dog-intelligence research of the past 15 years is not about breeds at all. It is about rare individual dogs with a talent for learning words.

The famous case is Chaser, a Border Collie trained by John Pilley. In a study reported by ScienceDaily, Pilley and Alliston Reid of Wofford College showed that Chaser had learned the names of 1,022 objects over about three years. The researchers stopped because of their own time limits, not hers.

Researchers in the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest then asked how rare this is. In a 2021 study, they tried to teach toy names to 40 dogs over three months. Most dogs showed no evidence of learning, whatever their age. Seven adult dogs learned between 11 and 37 new toy names, and all seven were Border Collies. Notably, 18 other Border Collies in the study learned nothing.

A follow-up search, published in Scientific Reports in December 2023 (Dror and colleagues), found 41 of these “gifted word learner” dogs in nine countries. 56% were Border Collies, but the group also included Pomeranians, a Pekingese, a Shih Tzu, a Corgi, a Poodle and several mixed breeds. In testing, they knew an average of 29 toy names, and 16 owners reported that their dogs had since learned more than 100. Most owners said they had not set out to teach toy names at all.

What is the IQ of a dog?

There is no real answer, because dogs do not have an IQ in the human sense. A human IQ score comes from a standardized test normed on a large sample of people, then placed on the IQ scale, with an average of 100. Nothing like that exists for dogs. (For the human version, see our explainer on what IQ is and how it is calculated.)

What you will find instead:

• At-home “dog IQ” tests. Coren’s book includes tests that let owners estimate their dog’s “IQ,” according to Publishers Weekly. They are fun and informal, not a validated scale.
• The “as smart as a 2-year-old” claim. At the American Psychological Association’s 2009 convention, Coren said that on several behavioral measures dogs’ mental abilities are close to a human child aged 2 to 2.5 years. He estimated an average dog can learn about 165 words and signals, the top 20% about 250, and that dogs can count to four or five (APA release via ScienceDaily). Linguist Geoffrey Pullum pushed back on Language Log, arguing that dogs are not as bright linguistically as 2-year-olds and that responding to trained words is not the same as understanding language. Treat the comparison as a rough analogy.
• Evidence for a “g factor” in dogs. In humans, people who do well on one kind of mental test tend to do well on others. Rosalind Arden and Mark Adams tested 68 Border Collies on detour, pointing and quantity tasks and found a similar pattern, with a general factor explaining 17% of the variance in scores (Arden and Adams, 2016, Intelligence). That was one breed of working farm dogs, so it is an early result.

So the honest answer to “what is the IQ of a dog?” is: researchers measure specific skills, not a single number. Dogs are one chapter in a much bigger story about animal minds; our ranking of the smartest animals shows how they compare with crows, chimpanzees and octopuses.

Is one of the smartest dog breeds right for you?

If you are choosing a dog, the research points to a few practical takeaways:

1. Use the ranking as a guide to trainability, not overall brains. The top breeds learn commands quickly. That is great if you want a training partner, and exhausting if you do not.
2. Expect a high-ranked dog to need work. Herding and working breeds were bred to do a job all day. Without exercise and training, a quick learner may teach itself habits you would rather it skipped.
3. Meet the individual dog. With breed explaining about 9% of behavioral variation, the dog in front of you tells you more than its breed label.
4. Do not write off low-ranked breeds. Coren himself argued against breeding low-ranked dogs out of the population, because each breed’s instinctive abilities and companion qualities have value (Psychology Today). A low obedience rank is not a low worth.

You know your dog’s smarts. Curious about your own?

Dog intelligence is measured skill by skill, with no single score. Human intelligence can be summarized in one: IQ tests are built on large norm groups, so your result shows where you stand relative to other people. If you want to see what that kind of test looks like, start with our guide to IQ test questions.

When you are ready, take the IQtonics IQ test. It has 40 questions across five areas (patterns, spatial reasoning, numbers, logic and memory) with a 20-minute time limit, and the questions get harder as you go. Your score is placed on the standard scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, with a percentile and a profile of your strongest areas. Starting the test is free; your full results unlock with a trial membership, which renews automatically unless you cancel it. It is an online test, not a clinical assessment, and no, it will not tell you whether you would out-learn a Border Collie.